Hillary Clinton, Janet Napolitano blow off deadline in Senate letter

Four Ranking members of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Budget - Jeff Sessions, Orrin Hatch, Pat Robers, and Charles Grassley (knows a thing or two about letters being ignored in Fast and Furious investigation) - sent a letter addressed to both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on August 6th. It contained an August 20th deadline that requested a response to five questions.

The problem? Allegedly, illegal aliens are being encouraged to apply for U.S. Government welfare programs.

Via Daily Caller:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano are mum on why the legal requirements that immigrants and visa applicants not be reliant on government assistance have been watered down, according to some lawmakers.

The deadline for Clinton and Napolitano to respond to a letter regarding admission of immigrants on or likely to be on assistance programs from senior Republicans on the Budget, Judiciary, Finance, and Agriculture Committees came and passed Monday.

On Tuesday Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, the ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee, blasted the pair for their failure to comply.

“It is unacceptable that Secretary Napolitano and Secretary Clinton have not seen fit to respond our oversight letter,” Sessions said in a statement. “It is a sound principle of immigration law that those who come to our country should be able to take care of themselves financially, yet this legal requirement has effectively been waived. Under their agencies’ guidelines, an able-bodied, working-age immigrant could receive the bulk of his or her income in the form of federal assistance and still not be deemed welfare-reliant.”

Here is a list of the five questions posed by the four Senators that went unanswered by the August 20th deadline:

1. An explanation of why receipt of most welfare benefits is excluded from consideration of citizenship eligibility, and how this complies with the (Immigration and Nationality Act) INA and Congressional intent.
2. From 2001 to 2011, how many visa applicants and applicants for admission through the Visa Waiver Program were denied visas or admission because they were deemed likely to become a public charge?
3. From 2001 to 2011, how many visa applicants were found likely to become a public charge but were nevertheless granted a visa and admitted into the United States because they presented an affidavit of support?
4. How many aliens issued visas or otherwise admitted into the United States from 2001 to 2011 became public charges as defined by your agency after entering the United States?
5. If your answers to the above questions are that your agencies do not track this information, then please explain why this information is not tracked.

Again, those questions were ignored when the August 20th deadline came and went.

Gee, for some reason, I'm reminded of the Cloward-Piven strategy. Check out this first paragraph from a Discover the Networks entry:

First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the Cloward-Piven Strategy seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

Cloward-Piven... on steroids perhaps?

Video: MSNBC's counterattack on Mitt Romney quite weak

Look, anyone who visits this blog knows that it pains me to have anything good to say about Mitt Romney but in this case, it's warranted. First of all, Hilary Rosen's comment that Ann Romney hasn't worked a day in her life actually made Mitt a more sympathetic figure, even to me. Whether the statement was calculated or not makes little difference at this point. If the Axelrod Brigade pushed even me closer to Romney, they miscalculated.

Fast forward to a segment from MSNBC's Chris Hayes, a notably liberal commentator. After watching this, see if you don't find yourself asking whether Rosen's comments - as well as the perceived backlash - may have all been manufactured. After all, the mainstream media is liberal so for those entities to feed that narrative, it's at least possible. In fact, they may have thought they were baiting the Romney campaign a bit.

Check out this clip from Hayes. Note how it includes Romney on the campaign trail saying that he wants mothers to be forced to work instead of accept welfare because it gives them the "dignity of work." Hayes argues that this is contradictory to Romney's position that being a stay-at-home mom is work.

This clip will be effective with the mindless, liberal masses but there's one very important variable missing from Hayes' analysis; that variable is welfare. For some reason, he operates from a premise here that a stay-at-home mother on welfare is equal to a stay-at-home mother who is part of a self-sustaining familial unit. Children under parental supervision can't do whatever they want. There are strings attached to being provided for. Ever hear the saying, "As long as you're under my roof, you'll follow my rules." When you extrapolate that to welfare, the same applies. If you want to be subsidized by my tax dollars, the strings attached will be that you will be taught how to provide for yourself.

Painting Romney as a hypocrite on this issue without factoring in welfare is lame and you won't find me defending Romney very often.

That reminds me, the optics of John McCain standing next to Romney in this clip don't do him any favors.

MediaIt'es Tommy Christopher also seems to miss that very important point.